The Office of the Associate Director for Data Science at the National Institute of Health (NIH) invites you to attend World-Scale Personalized Learning Through Crowdsourcing and Algorithms on Wednesday, June 1, 2016, 3:30pm (EST) as part of the NIH Frontiers in Data Science Lecture Series and in conjunction with the National Science Foundation. The speaker will be Dr. Po-Shen Loh, Associate Professor of Mathematics, Carnegie Mellon University and founder of expii.com, an education technology startup providing a free personalized learning platform on every smartphone. Po-Shen Loh is a math enthusiast and evangelist. He is also the national coach of the USA International Mathematical Olympiad team. As an academic, Po-Shen has numerous distinctions, from an International […]

The National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health has launched an online platform to enable the research community and the public to submit ideas on the National Cancer Moonshot efforts. The goal of the Moonshot Initiative is to accelerate progress in the fight against cancer by swiftly advancing knowledge from cutting-edge basic research to new prevention and treatment strategies for patients, said NCI Acting Director Douglas Lowy, M.D. The community involvement that the initiative garners will allow us to consider novel, creative ideas that might not otherwise have come to NCI’s attention. Submissions will be considered by the Blue Ribbon Panel (BRP) of scientific experts and […]

The National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recently published a Federal Register Notice for a national Pill Image Recognition Challenge. NLM seeks YOUR input in developing high-quality algorithms and software that rank known images of prescription pills in the NLM RxIMAGE database by similarity to consumer-quality images of unknown prescription pills. NLM plans to use the submissions in creating a future software system and Application Programming Interface (API) that can be used in identifying an unknown prescription pill from a photo taken of that pill by a smart phone. Parties wishing to participate in the Challenge are provided with a training data set. The submission […]

Stanford University, in conjunction with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Research Councils of the United Kingdom (RCUK) with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), is hosting a Transatlantic Data Science Workshop. This two-day workshop will be held on March 1-2, 2016 at the NIH campus in Bethesda, MD. The objectives of this workshop are: To facilitate the development of novel computational approaches to health; To guide computer scientists, data scientists, statisticians, computational scientists, and mathematicians in discovering and accessing US and UK health datasets; and To support early stage researchers in establishing interdisciplinary, international collaborations. The first day of the workshop will be devoted to exploring […]

The National Institute of Health (NIH) has announced that it will fund the development of three co-robots, or robots that work cooperatively with people, as part of its fourth year of participation in the National Robotics Initiative (NRI). In addition to the NIH, the National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Department of Defense are supporting the development of co-robots. The three innovative co-robots being supported by NIH are: 1. A four-legged robotic smart-walker designed to help improve the mobility and quality of life of the elderly being developed by Dr. Xiangrong Shen at the University of Alabama. The robot has two […]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has partnered with London-based Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to launch a global science competition for new products to advance “open science,” a movement to make scientific research data broadly accessible to the public. From the NIH news release: The volume of digital information generated by biomedical research often called “big data” is growing at a rapidly increasing pace. Researchers’ ability to derive knowledge from data is hindered by their ability to find, access and use it. The goal of the Open Science Prize is to support the development and prototyping of services, tools and platforms to overcome these hurdles to ensure data […]